Shoshone National Forest: The First One

The forest you are passing through or approaching is not simply one of many national forests. It is the first one. On March thirtieth, eighteen ninety-one, President Benjamin Harrison signed a proclamation setting aside what he called the Yellowstone Park Timberland Reserve, acting under authority Congress had granted just days earlier in the General Revision Act. That act gave the president power to create forest reserves from the public domain, and Harrison used it immediately, designating what became the foundation of the entire National Forest System.

At the time, the concern was practical and urgent. Yellowstone National Park had been established in eighteen seventy-two, but the forests surrounding it were vulnerable to uncontrolled logging, and the watersheds that fed the rivers of the interior West were being stripped. The reserve was meant to protect that buffer. It encompassed roughly one point three million acres of the Absaroka and Wind River ranges east of Yellowstone, terrain that human beings had used for at least ten thousand years and that the Arapaho, Crow, Blackfeet, Shoshone, Nez Perce, and other nations had traveled and hunted for generations before any federal proclamation.

Five million additional acres were added in nineteen oh two. When President Theodore Roosevelt and Congress established the United States Forest Service in nineteen oh five to manage federal forests scientifically and sustainably, the Shoshone, renamed in nineteen oh eight, became a cornerstone of the new agency's identity. Its first supervisor was the same generation of land managers who had argued that forests were not simply timber to be cut but watersheds, wildlife habitats, and public goods to be managed in perpetuity.

Today the Shoshone covers approximately two point four million acres, running from the Montana state line south to Lander, Wyoming, encompassing portions of the Absaroka, Beartooth, and Wind River ranges. Its peaks include some of Wyoming's most demanding wilderness, and its eastern boundary abuts the high sagebrush country where the road drops toward Cody.

Every national forest in America, from the Olympic Peninsula to the Chattahoochee, traces its legal lineage to the proclamation Harrison signed for this ground.